Can You Digg it? What is Digg and How Does it Work?

Social news sites

Social news sites haven’t been quite as in the spotlight since Twitter and Facebook seemed to have sucked up more of our time and attention, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t a valuable resource for both sharing your information and learning about a topic.

Easily the most popular social news site is Digg, which was partially propelled to success thanks to the personality of its founder, Kevin Rose. Figures from 2008, according to ReadWriteWeb, showed Digg receiving 230 million page views a month, and I’ll go ahead and assume that traffic is still high.

How Digg is social:

Digg, essentially, is a social news site where users rate, or “digg”, stories they find interesting. The site tends to lean toward tech, weird, or ponderous news, and away from traditional news stories. The digg.com portal is very social indeed — it reminds you of all the stories your friends would probably link, tweet or email you because the top stories are ranked by how many times they’ve been dugg.

If you’re trying to promote your own content, Digg makes it easy by allowing you to add simple buttons to your stories, or by creating your own account and adding articles yourself. While it is easy to use, it’s important to monitor articles and make sure they don’t get showed down to the bottom of the pile; there’s a lot of new content coming in all the time.

If you want to use Digg for browsing, they even have handy extensions for Firefox and Chrome that allow you to automatically digg stories you are reading, see the digg count for articles while you’re on the page, and see what articles your friends Digg. In fact, since Digg is one form of a social network, being social is key. If you’re going to to use Digg for promotion, try not to only digg stories from your blog or web site. Just like if someone were just blasting Facebook and Twitter with their own links and not interacting, only digging your own stuff looks pretty spammy.

And while Digg seems to have a wide variety of topics, things seem to thrive better if they are of the more ‘geeky’/tech-based/weird sort, not traditional fare. So if you’re that category, Digg may be the place for you.